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Friday 23rd November at EIKE 12th International Conference on Climate and Energy, Munich 6pm Monday 26th November in Oslo, with Klimaterealistene, Norway 20.00 Weds 28th November in London at the Headquarters of GWPF 6pm 55 Tufton Street, London, info@thegwpf.org How to Destroy a Perfectly Good Electricity Grid in Three Complicated Steps

It takes skill, money and blind faith to trash decades of good engineering.

Find out how to achieve state-wide blackouts, flying squads of diesel generators, and a tripling of wholesale electricity prices in just five years. Admire the virtue signalling ambition of a nation that controls just 1.5% of human emissions yet is trying to change the global weather by sacrificing its largest export earner and main source of electricity.

Australia once had some of the cheapest electricity in the world to one of the most expensive, even though it has more coal and uranium per person than almost any place on Earth. As renewables go in everywhere, businesses are closing. Even in a sunny and windy nation, seductive free “clean” energy turned out to be a poisonous gift because of all the hidden [...]

The Times: Lorry drivers joined the protest movement today as ministers struggled to restore order with at least 35 motorways partially or completely blocked, along with at least 18 motorway sliproads. Barricades were erected across dozens of other roads around the country. — h/t to GWPF for the latest

The climate change collectivist overlords were always going to overdo it

Changing the global climate is such a ridiculously ambitious task that there was never any real limit to the imposts that would be demanded. So the zealots and the rent seekers would take what they could get, and then ask for more in escalating cycles, until the people finally rose up in revolt.

Apparently, the French have hit that point. Its spontaneous chaos, violence, and blockades. But the protest is supported by nearly 4 out 5 people:

Gilets jaunes protest likely to continue

Saturday: 227 protesters were injured, the majority of which were caused by drivers attempting to force their way through blockades; one 63-year-old woman attending the gilets jaunes protest in Savoie was killed after a driver “panicked” and accelerated into protesters. 117 people were arrested and 73 [...]

A new grassroots group is forming to lobby to get Australia out of the Paris Patsy Agreement. The people who are fed up with us being The Crash Test Dummies of Renewables include movers and shakers, professors, farmers, MP’s, executive giants of the mining and medical research industry, engineers, and surgeons. It includes Larry Pickering (cartoonist), Hugh Morgan, Alan Moran, Ian Plimer, Jerry Ellis, John Stone, Peter Farrell (ResMed), Ron Manners, Gina Rheinhart, Geoff Bennett, Colin Boyce, Bob Bryan, Ron Pike, David Archibald, Prof Ivan Kennedy, Prof Peter Ridd, Bill Kininmonth (former head of the National Climate Centre) and so many more. Credit to Viv Forbes of Carbonsense.

My thoughts on why we need The Saltbush Club:

“Who speaks for consumers? Our elected reps are supposed to, but few are willing to speak up. There is a $1.5 trillion dollar global industry that wants Australia to accept Paris, but no debate about the vested interests that stand to profit while Australian consumers and businesses pay carbon taxes they have voted against every time they had the chance.”

Good people of Earth are spending thousands of billions of dollars to prevent a future predicted by models that we know don’t work. The debate is over, climate spending is an unscientific, pagan, theological quest to change the weather. Just another iteration of what Druids and Witchdoctors have been promising for eons. Don’t expect the vested interests that profit from this Golden Climate Gravy Train to tell you this.

The top 23 global coupled climate models don’t understand the climate and can’t predict it. Our CO2 emissions are accelerating, the effect should be amplifying, but millions of weather balloons and satellites that circle the Earth 24 hours a day show unequivocally that the models are wrong.

TROPICAL MID-TROPOSPHERIC TEMPERATURE VARIATIONS MODELS vs OBSERVATIONS5-Year Averages, 1979-2016 – Trend line crosses zero at 1979 for all time series

The Climate Study Group have placed this graph in an advert (why do skeptics have to pay to get graphs like this — a public service — printed?)

Read the whole Climate Reality PDF here.

Acolytes and fellow parasites will say that surface temperatures measured by NASA and Hadley [...]

Thanks to the Californian conflagration, Global Climate Superstition is here again to tell us that fires in coal plants cause fires in forests. Scientists, on the other hand, find that as emissions got higher there was a fall in wildfires globally, droughts didn’t get worse and winds have slowed.

The witchdoctors play on the Back in the days when people rowed their battleships to war, the megadroughts were really mega. Despite all the mechanization (or probably because of it) global biomass burning was lower in the last century than anytime since Julius Caesar.

If CO2 is the driving force behind fires apparently we need more of it.

When it comes to fire, temperature is not as important as wind speed, fuel load, and the density of arsonists.

Last we heard, winds were slowing globally at a rate of 0.5km/hour. The great Global Stilling can’t be bad for fires (though it can’t be good for wind farms). Perhaps a slightly slower wind is irrelevant. But then if half a kilometer per hour of wind doesn’t matter, why does half a degree of warming? Judging by the actual area burned by fires, not.

When wowsers banned alcohol in the US, the price of beer rose sevenfold. Nick Cater points at rising coal share prices and ponders that the Green divestment plan to reduce coal use works just as well as prohibition did. Divestment shrinks capital inflow to coal mines, so there are fewer new mines, and less coal available. But people still want just as much coal as they ever did, so the price of coal goes up instead of down. Good news for coal investors. Too bad about those on the poverty line. Put some more dung in the barbie…..

.The Financial Times. (paywalled)

Once again Green economics amounts to Wish Fairy Declarations. The first Law of Free Markets is Supply and Demand. The Greens might have changed the “supply” slightly (temporarily, and only in some countries) but demand hasn’t changed, so supply will rebound.

To help the poor afford coal the only ethical thing to do is invest in coal mining:

Nick Cater, The Australian

History is unlikely to be kind to them. Coercive attempts to stop the use of fossil fuels are delivering the same perverse economic consequences as the attempts to close down American [...]

The closures and “heartbreaking” decisions are escalating as electricity contracts for businesses are being renegotiated in the new era of higher wholesale electricity prices. Family run operations that have survived for 40 years are being destroyed. Years of work, investment and training are being erased.

UPDATE: Dated July 2017

Businesses brace for crippling energy bill increases

Frank Chung News.com

“This is the biggest business crisis I’ve seen in my lifetime,” said Peter Strong, chief executive of the Council of Small Business Australia. “The GFC was managed and it affected everybody, but this is only Australia and we cannot see a solution.

“What we’re hearing is terrible. We’re seeing closures have already started, I fully expect there will be more closures and staff put off. When you’re running a small supermarket, where do you find an extra $70,000?”

Businesses are more exposed to the rapidly rising wholesale electricity costs than householders are, and long term contracts are being renegotiated. As they do, rises of 120% are hitting small businesses.

The price hikes hitting businesses of up 120 per cent — dwarfing the 20 per cent increases faced by households — have [...]

Some days I wonder if I should spread stories that make us sound like a recidivist third-world backwater struggling to maintain our voltage. But the ABC is already smashing away.

Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be another drawback to solar panels, lo! Solar Panels are pushing up the voltage at midday often as high as 253 Volts when it supposed to be more like 230 to 240V. This means appliances are using more electricity, that makes bills even higher. It may also be breaking appliances (making other bills go higher too). We’re not really sure about that, but when that study is done, it’ll already be 1.8 million panels too late.

Non-solar users are paying for this surge (and the appliances) — for every 1% increase in voltage, the costs go up 0.7%. Then, to ice that gravy-cake, the inverters on solar panels are also shutting off at 253V, meaning that poor home owners who paid thousands are not generating power for the grid. All up, solar is bad for you, bad for them, bad for our light-globes.

The warning comes from groups running the electricity networks in Australia.

The next ice coming to Europe might look something like the last ice age shown in this simulation. A time when Venice will be top of a long paddock that stretches to Albania.

In school children are taught to hyperventilate about the last 30m retreat of glaciers that never stayed put ever.

Instead, they could be studying this… (click to start)

At the 24,000 year BC point glaciers have wiped out Zurich, Bern, Geneva.

Image the effect on people if this were shown everytime a Swiss Alps disaster story was run?

OK, so it is a model

Advance and retreat of the Alpine glaciers during the last glacial cycle from Julien Seguinot on Vimeo.

About 25000 years ago, Alpine Glaciers filled most of the valleys and even extended onto the plains. Using a computer model that contains knowledge on glacier physics based on modern observations of Greenland and Antarctica and laboratory experiments on ice, help from traces left by glaciers on the landscape, and one of the fastest computers in the world, this animation is an attempt to reconstruct of the evolution of Alpine Glaciers in time from 120000 years ago to today.

Wind turbines either kill or scare away three quarters of buzzards, hawks and kites at three sites in India. That makes them the new “top predator” in the ecosystem according to new research. Perhaps not the niche that Greens were expecting wind farms to occupy.

It’s not all bad news though, fan-throated lizards are pretty happy about not being dinner.

h/t GWPF

Lizards vote for wind.

Wind farms are the ‘new apex predators’: Blades kill off 75% of buzzards, hawks and kites that live nearby, study shows

Harry Pettit for Daily Mail Online

Predatory bird numbers are four times higher in areas away from wind turbines This is having a devastating ’ripple effect’ across the food chain It means numbers of certain small animals are growing unchecked [...]